THE SOUND DOESN'T match the picture. I'm driving a Porsche 911 of late 1980s vintage. Arrayed before me are its five big, clear analog driving dials, visible through the simple three-spoke wheel. The windscreen is upright for a sports car by modern standards, and the thin roof pillars let light flood in but would buckle fast in a rollover. Beyond the screen, the two long steel cannons bearing the headlights point directly down the closed runway, the car's sloping hood slung low between them.
So far, so Porsche. But the guttural, unfiltered rattle-rasp of the air-cooled engine beloved by Porsche purists and central to an old 911's appeal is entirely absent. Instead, there's just a low, constant background whirr. It doesn't increase much when I bury the throttle, but the speed does, exponentially. This old car suddenly leaps forward 30 years, accelerating as quickly as the fastest Tesla—and too fast for your brain to process the torrent of visual information now being streamed at it. You just have to remind yourself that the runway was clear before you hit the “gas” and keep your foot to the floor for as long as you dare. It's hilarious, frightening and deeply strange to anyone familial- with old Porsches: a 20th-century view with 21st-century noise and performance.
How does this incongruity make you feel? Some consider the idea of a desirable, collectible, important classic car having its engine stripped out and replaced with an electric motor as progress; others as sacrilege. Some see classic cars as art and as inappropriate to modify as the . Others view them as more akin to architecture: beautiful but functional and in need of occasional rewiring and replumbing to suit the
